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In recent years China has positioned itself as a global economic leader, working through its “Belt and Road” initiative (BRI) and Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), to not only expand its global economic reach, but to organize and lead global economic relations. China’s rise is largely understood in economic terms, but the history of global power dynamics suggests that such leadership is built on both economic and political-military foundations.

Following Mills, several prominent sociologists have encouraged researchers to analyze actors’ motive talk not as data on the subjective desires that move them to pursue particular ends but as post hoc accounts oriented toward justifying actions already undertaken.

The strength of weak ties is among the most important theories in the social sciences. One paradoxical element of the theory has been widely understood and valued—that weak ties connect disparate regions of social structure. Less appreciated, however, is the arguably more paradoxical implication that someone only weakly connected to another would provide value beyond that which is provided by the recipient’s (ego’s) strong ties. Once this paradoxical feature of the theory and associated empirical literatures is acknowledged, the interests of the resource provider (alter) demand consideration.

We develop a method of imputing ego network characteristics for respondents in probability samples of individuals. This imputed network uses the homophily principle to estimate certain properties of a respondent’s core discussion network in the absence of actual network data. These properties measure the potential exposure of respondents to the attitudes, values, beliefs, and so on of their (likely) network alters.

We examine whether anticipated gender discrimination—specifically, gendered sanctions for leadership failure—decreases women’s leadership ambitions. We find that laypeople expect that women leaders will be punished more harshly for failure than otherwise similar men. We also compare the leadership ambitions of women and men under conditions of benign and costly failure and find that leadership roles with costly failure—which implicitly have the potential for gendered sanctions for failure—disproportionally depress women’s leadership ambitions relative to men’s.

Do appeals that subtly invoke negative racial stereotypes shift whites’ political attitudes by harnessing their racial prejudice? Though widely cited in academic and popular discourse, prior work finds conflicting evidence for this “dogwhistle hypothesis.” Here we test the hypothesis in two experiments (total N = 1,797) in which white Americans’ racial attitudes were measured two weeks before they read political messages in which references to racial stereotypes were implicit, explicit, or not present at all.

This article examines the effect of exposure to post-9/11 stigmatization on various types of Muslim political engagement, using a mixed-methods approach that combines propensity score matching analysis of data from the Muslims in the American Public Square (MAPS) survey administered immediately after 9/11 with experimental data of the U.S. Muslim population. I find that increased discrimination results in increased political interest but has a neutral or dampening effect on political participation.

Much research documents that uncertainty is an important factor in the social influence process. We argue that there are two senses in which uncertainty plays a role. First, task uncertainty is a necessary but variable condition for social influence to occur. Second, uncertainty reduction is a mechanism producing social influence. We discuss how tasks can vary in the level of uncertainty they entail and how this impacts the mechanisms resulting in social influence. In this context, we predict that task uncertainty moderates social influence and that uncertainty reduction mediates it.

The women of Iran are intimately familiar with repression and segregation. Iran’s mandatory dress code—veiling—is but one of many restrictions that regulate and control women’s bodies and shape their sense of agency and freedom.